Superhero Adventures, UK Style

Inspired by the adventure “The Persephone Extraction”

X-Ray sat anxiously in the team transport the others jokingly referred to as ‘The Crate’, as he nervously reviewed in his mind the cryptic message that Frankie had forwarded on following the kidnapping of Stacy; ‘An exchange – a diamond for a traitor. Bring me my bride. No outsiders.’

The text message had been accompanied by a picture of an unconscious Stacy in her crystalline meta-form, the address of the Carpathian Embassy in London and a countdown app showing 24 hours. It was already over an hour and a half into its… what? What would happen to her when the countdown reached zero, had been left unsaid.

They had already wasted too much time just flying back from Rannoch Moor and the Deep Six prison to the scene of the crime.

As they travelled, Brian wondered whom the ‘Bride’ mentioned in the message was. The only connection that Akira and Banshee could think of that related to a bride was Elana, Countess Dolengen of Gratz who, according to them, was the estranged fourth ‘bride’ of Prince Drakul’, Dracula, who he had turned and then abandoned, leaving her trapped for centuries beneath a monastery in France.

The kidnappers were offering to exchange Stacy for the right bride, was this the ‘bride’ they should be looking for? Akira was muttering something about not being able to palm them off with Mary.

When he had been patrolling Stoke-on-Trent, X-Ray had previously encountered someone who’d claimed to be a vampire, when he’d uncovered the Temple of the Wampyri, but he’d always assumed that he’d been a Meta with a Dracula complex who’d gained vampire-like powers during his breakthrough, not that he’d been a real vampire! The other cultists had all been human, just gothic vampire want-to-be’s, but Akira and Banshee were talking as though vampires were real.

Akira continued, “One good thing is you can fire wooden stakes at them, right through their hearts, and not get into trouble for killing someone mortal.”

“So, you’re saying vampires have no protection or legal rights?” responded X-Ray.

“I suppose you could be charged with desecrating a corpse if you staked one.”

“One more question, do they have a vulnerability to ultraviolet light?”

“Most are vulnerable to sunlight though some, like Dracula, seem to be immune for some reason, enough to be able to walk around during the day anyway.”

The other two were now casually talking about having encountered Dracula himself, both in the past and in the present day. Something about the great fire of London being set to stop a vampire uprising and then in the nineteenth century Dracula using his shapeshifting powers to change himself into a doppelgänger of the then deceased Prince Albert to bedazzle Queen Victoria in an attempt to take control of the British Empire. This plan had been thwarted when they and a group of vampire hunters, including apparently Jack the Ripper, had intervened. Jack’s victims having all been previously turned into victim-enticing vampires?

He had to know if crosses had any effect and if so, what about if the vampire had been a Hindu or atheist? Akira laughed and explained that religious objects didn’t work and appeared to be psychological at best. However, he remembered when a crucifix had been the focus for a mystical spell – the Illumination of Abbridon had been used to concentrate its mystical energy into the object – that should work, against most vampires anyway.

They casually mentioned that they’d also encountered Dracula in modern day. Were they really claiming that Dracula was real or were they pulling his leg? It was hard to be sure with Akira but he was reasonably sure Mary wouldn’t do that to him.

So, this Elana vanished 1598 in Austria and was subsequently captured by the monks of the Abbaye of Saint-Martin-du-Canigou, in the village of Casteil in France decades later. The team had encountered her a few years ago but X-Ray couldn’t work out if The Balance had faced Dracula himself that time, but he’d clearly intended to enslave Elana again, only for her to escape and flee.

Could she be the ‘bride’ mentioned in the message? It was the only ‘bride’ that the other two could think might be important enough to warrant kidnapping Stacy for and thus risking the team’s wrath.

The team contacted an ‘expert’, the famous novelist of gothic horror, Naomi van Helsing, of the ‘Vampire Geneviève’ fame, to see if she knew where this vampire bride might be hiding out. She agreed that Dracula might still want to find Elana in order to take her Meta abilities and powers for himself but, as far as Naomi knew, she was still in the wind. Elana was now knowledgeable in both modern-day English and French so could have gone to ground in either country but that was just a guess on Naomi’s part. She apologised, agreed to ask a few questions of her contacts and would get back to them if she found out anything, then ended the call.

Mary landed the craft in the hangar of the BASEment but Brian had already opened the door and headed towards Frankie’s main interface in the lounge even before the engines had switched off.

He saw an apologetic Jeeves talking with Frankie, the team’s AI and hacker extraordinaire. Despite their best efforts, they had been unable to confirm Stacy’s current location and at X-Rays request, a search for Elana on the web had proved pointless. There was no trace of Elana, other than in history books and novels, to be found.

Jeeves admitted that the ‘stable door protocol’ hadn’t been enacted on X-Ray, Stacy or Singularity yet, so there is no way to trace where she’d been taken. The presumption was that she was being held prisoner in the Carpathian Embassy based on where the text massage had apparently originated, though there were no guarantees that the text hadn’t been unofficially routed through them.  

In his anxiety to find her, he vaguely heard Jeeves explain that the stable door protocol were electronic trackers sown into the teams clothing (but not inserted into their bodies so as to prevent any kidnappers or attackers from having to carve the trackers out). They remained inactive when in physical contact with the wearers’ bio-signature but if removed or manually activated (using a trigger word) they sent out a traceable GPS signal.

Brian didn’t care. If they hadn’t been fitted, why waste time discussing what should have been?

He was for storming the Carpathian Embassy in Belgravia now, but Mary suggested she try to use her dowsing ability to track Stacy’s current location before they caused another international incident with a country that already listed the team as terrorists.

She grabbed her pendulum from her room up above in container town, tied Stacy’s favourite scarf from her handbag around the pendant and forced herself to enter a trace as she enticed the Celtic goddess Mór-Ríoghain to guide her search.

The pendant circled randomly for a few minutes then began to pull towards the Southeast. Frankie calculated that the direction of the swing bypassed London completely, but it passed through Paris and beyond that towards either Lyon or Geneva and continued down into Italy. Given its imprecision, it was hard to be exact. “One night in Paris is like a year anywhere else” murmured Akira.

Well, that prevented a potential diplomatic incident, as it appeared as though if Stacy had been at the London embassy, she wasn’t there now.

As useful as Mary’s dowsing ability was, it only gave them a general direction not an actual destination. While the team was arguing about the best way to proceed, to Brian’s annoyance his personal mobile rang with an urgent call from his bank.

Without thinking, he stepped out of the room and accepted the call. To his amazement, the bank explained that they needed him to confirm that he and his wife wanted her replacement debit card sent to their new address in Paris.

What? The request sent his mind into hyperdrive. The person repeated. That the bank had received a request apparently from Stacy earlier that morning for a replacement debit card for their joint account to be sent to their new address in Paris.

Their records showed that she wanted it sent to an apartment recently rented by them in the suburb of San Denis, 9 kilometres north of the city centre. Recently, like earlier that day.

Before the bank would agree to send a replacement card to their joint account overseas, they wanted Brian to confirm that this was authorised by both account holders and, for security purposes, could he confirm how much the last item paid for on the card was for?

At Brian’s insistence, they were happily to reveal it was a car rental charge made earlier that day to a car hire showroom in Paris, towards the hire of a Peugeot. Could he confirm the amount?

Instead, Brian stated that he would like the address that they had been told to send the card to and cancelled the request claiming it was a mistake.

Someone was either trying to help them by giving them clues or it was a trap. Brian accessed their account online, confirmed that an apartment had been rented in his wife’s name and obtained the name of the independent car hire company in Saint Denis.

Using the information, Frankie accessed the online CCTV system of the car hire firm and confirmed that the car hired had been collected outside of normal office hours by a bald-headed man, not Stacy. Frankie enhanced the car registration plates to confirm that it’s registration was WC-982-FG.

X-Ray was for heading to Paris, now. He grabbed his HCP ID card as he planned to follow this up as X-Ray and not as Brian. The others insisted on accompanying him and grabbed their own IDs ready to head to Paris.

They boarded the Crate and filed a flight plan to Charles de Gaulle Airport before they could head on to the Saint-Denis suburb to the north of Paris city centre. Frankie explained that their Commdots were already pre-programmed for French translation and that she had intercepted reports that an hour after Stacy’s kidnap a Carpathian-registered airplane had left Wessex regional airport for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Then early this morning the aircraft was reported stolen from Gatwick, the flight unauthorised by the Carpathian authorities.

Frankie had ‘intercepted’ the Charles de Gaulle security feeds for more information, after a potential security breach in connection with that same flight. The feed was relatively poor quality, possibly due to whatever method Frankie was using to intercept the supposedly secure camera feed.

It showed six passengers and crew leaving the plane and heading towards customs, all bald-headed men, using Carpathian diplomatic passports. They had a large crate with them that they claimed was part of the diplomatic bag, despite it vastly exceeding size restrictions for such.  The crate was both big and heavy enough to contain an unconscious Stacy even if she was still in her diamond form.

The request to pass through customs with the crate unexamined resulted in a diplomatic incident as Customs refused to let them through until they had checked out how to proceed. The six men and their crate were escorted to a holding area, which unfortunately wasn’t covered by CCTV cameras.

The airport police were subsequently authorised to seize the crate and examine its contents only to discover that the passengers had somehow managed to get out of the airport undetected, leaving the crate behind. This was found to be unsealed and empty. CCTV cameras saw them leave the airport carrying a heavy solid object between four of them, body-sized but covered by a thick fire blanket, to a black van with tinted windows parked outside.

It had been allowed to park so close to the gates due to it having diplomatic plates allocated to the Carpathian Embassy. They later claimed that the plates had also been stolen.  The van then vanished into the chaos of Parisian traffic and had not been found despite the city having an extensive network of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) Cameras to capture images of moving vehicles enabling the local Police to monitor registration plates.

Carpathian Authorities had seized back their plane and refused to allow anyone to examine it.

Akira wondered why they would refuse to allow anyone to examine the plane? Was it worth them checking it out themselves when they arrived, in stealth mode obviously? Possibly Akira could even try viewing the past.

By the time they arrived in Paris and cleared customs they would have at best twenty hours left before the timer ran out.

Mary reminded them that European Community rules regarding visiting Meta teams stated that if they were carrying out any investigations in other countries that permission had to be requested of the local team who would then act as their liaison with the local Police. Regardless, they needed to head to the airport first in order to enter the Country legally via customs using either their passports or HCP ID cards.

Akira placed the call to Le Nouveaux Chavaliers de Paris and was immediately put through to the leader of the Parisian team, Aramis.

They briefly explained that they were heading to Paris to resolve a personal matter that involved one of their team members and didn’t foresee their needing direct assistance but they would appreciate the courtesy of their legal support if they had to use their powers or arrest someone. They kept the request vague while emphasising the need for discretion. To their surprise, Aramis arrogantly informed them that any investigations on Parisian soil would need to be carried out by his team, and they should send over whatever information and details of any ‘méfaits ou le crime’ they had and he and his team would decide if it warranted their attention. They did not want a foreign team trying to deal with crime or criminals in France.

The phone call ended abruptly and Akira immediately suggested they should contact another French team instead or detour via Italy, as they had to be a lot more reasonable. It was Mary who calmed him down by pointing out that the ‘Chavaliers’ couldn’t stop them visiting France and they could always sneak in by turning invisible if necessary.

Akira still wanted to stir things up by phoning the L’Avant Garde team or possibly the European Community’s Première Réponse and telling them that the Chavaliers had been badmouthing them behind their backs and rather than talk with the monkeys they wanted to deal with the organ grinder.

Mary laughed, “The Chav’ fellas are Parisians, the other teams will probably assume they do that all the time anyway. In the end, if we are in Paris then they will default to their decision on the matter given their official links with the city’s gendarme and not want to interfere or override them.”

The final decision was to head to the airport and investigate the airplane first, look for clues.

As soon as they arrived, the parked up the Crate on the hard shoulder and stated to Airport Control that they were having a temporary layover due to some technical difficulties and wouldn’t be planning to exit the international transit area at this time.  Then the three of them turned invisible and, following Frankie’s directions left the craft and headed towards the confiscated Carpathian plane.

It had been parked in a nearby hangar and was currently unguarded. Banshee phased them inside and they confirmed that the small plane had been used only to transport the people and the crate, with a couple of seats being temporarily removed to make way for something about two metres long and a metre wide – presumably the wooden crate they’d seen on the airports security feed.

The plane was otherwise empty, no paperwork or even drink glasses with traces of blood in them. Akira elected to view the past and immediately got the impression that someone had been drugged or incapacitated in some way and had been lying in the crate’s location throughout the journey, cramped and in the dark. Their thoughts were nightmarish and confused, but they were not stressed or frightened by whatever had been done to her. It was definitely a ‘she’, though the thoughts were too chaotic to confirm the prisoners’ identity.

He got the impression that she had been increased in weight despite her petite form and was protecting herself even if she wasn’t consciously doing so. Thankfully, although the crate had been hot and stuffy there were air holes in the walls that allowed ‘her’ to breathe freely.

Akira focused on the chairs nearby and ‘saw’ her captors, all older-looking bald men, frail in appearance yet they were clearly able to manhandle the crate with relative ease between four of them once the plane had landed.

Akira turned to X-Ray, “Okay your wife is alive or was when she was here, at least I think it was her – she’s put on a lot of weight and was unconscious but apart from that she was alright and she wasn’t in distress but I got a strong impression she’d been hypnotised.”

X-Ray let out a sigh of relief and muttered, “She must have turned into Kristal, in response to the attack. Unfortunately, we don’t do well against psychic or mental abilities.”

What now? They discussed whether to try to work with the local team or go it alone. In the end, the fact that Frankie was able to hack into the Gendarme computers swayed their decision towards an unofficial entry onto French soil while Frankie covertly accessed the city’s CCTV systems in an attempt to search for the crate, black van or the hired Peugeot.

A second later Frankie confirmed the Peugeot had been last seen a couple of hours ago being driven through the Latin Quarter by an unknown male – another baldy. X-Ray wondered why they were all bald.

Frankie then confirmed that a deep dive into the Estate agent’s computer systems had confirmed the address in Saint Denis and the lease had all been organised remotely, online and over the phone.

The final kicker for Brian had been that the transaction had been carried out in fluent French. Stacy didn’t speak any French, she’d only taken basic Spanish at school.

Time to leave the airport and go ‘commando’ according to a grinning Akira. No sense going through the terminal and risk having to pass through the X-Ray tunnels – being invisible wouldn’t stop Akira or him registering on the airport security systems.

Invisible, they rose into the air and headed off towards Paris proper, relying on the commdots to translate back and forth for them. Akira whispered that it was well known that everyone in France could speak perfect English, but they refused to do so and demanded everyone else attempt to communicate in bad French much to their amusement. God help the person who asked a Parisian “Parlez-vous Anglais?” The answer would almost always be a “Non!”

As they travelled through the sky above the city, Frankie installed Carpathian translation into one of their available language slots, just in case it would be needed later.

Revolution was always bubbling beneath the surface in Paris; workers, students, immigrants, farmers, taxis there is always someone prepared to take to the streets to protest. Anarchy had a long history here, and this day was no exception. As the team flew above the city, they could see that there was a series of street protests going on across the districts, complete with burning bins, tear gas and riot police backed up by Parisian RAID officers, the French equivalent of SWAT teams. Despite it being evening the protesters were still refusing to go home and the protest was blocking all of the main streets around the district… Thankfully, they could fly above the disruption below as they changed direction towards the district of Saint Denis.

The side street they wanted was thankfully quiet and unaffected by any protests. The apartment was on the second floor of a rundown block in Saint-Denis, a suburb nine kilometres north of the city centre. Saint-Denis was a recovering industrial area, with low apartment buildings squatting between busy road and rail routes. This building stood out for being taller than those surrounding it.

The lobby and stairs of the apartment building was completely empty and surprisingly, unlocked at street level. They headed up to the second landing and entered the apartment by having Banshee phase through the steel-layered door and opening it from the inside to the others having confirmed that it was unoccupied.

Inside, the old furniture and new rubbish had the familiar look and smell of a temporary hideout. Paperwork and weapons lay discarded all around the small apartment. They turned visible again and began to search the rooms.

The first thing they found was up a hand-drawn building plan of an office building on the main table with what appeared to be a secure biological or chemical laboratory attached to it, but there’s no address or name. On one part of the laboratory, a storage room was marked with a red cross. Also marked on the plan was what they thought was an underground tunnel leading from the street to the rear of the building, possibly a sewer entrance. The building was unnamed.

They asked Frankie to try to match up the plan with an actual building if she could and X-Ray used his phone to send her a picture. Unfortunately, at this hour, it was impossible to access the city’s records directly and Frankie had to rely on searching online records, which were incomplete. She confirmed that there were over 40 different companies listed in Paris as having laboratories.

X-Ray asked if any of them had any links with Carpathia but if there was it wasn’t public knowledge though she would look deeper.

Meanwhile they found a street plan of the Latin Quarter of Paris, with a hand drawn red marker line from the Sorbonne University, UPMC Campus to the Pernety quarter located at the heart of the historic Wholesale District, with a hand drawn cross marked on it about halfway along the route. The cross indicated a quiet side street. Dates scribbled on the map suggested someone had been watching that location for some time. Today’s date was ringed in red.

There was also a laptop but it only had a basic operating system installed, no data – it had clearly been used for internet access only. Its search history suggested that the previous users had looked up the Balance several times in the last 24 hours.

A hire contract in Stacy’s name for a Peugeot car, license WC-982-FG was lying under the table. Beside it was a printed photograph of a pretty, dark-haired 50-year-old woman. It wasn’t a surveillance photo – it had been downloaded from a website and printed out. A reverse web search by Frankie revealed the source of the photo – it had been copied off the website of the Sorbonne University, and the image was of a part-time guest lecturer named Morgane Le Corre.

Another online search by Frankie revealed that Morgane Le Corre was a 50-year-old French biogenetic researcher and academic.  She had been employed by PRX Biogenetics since 1998, and from 2007 was listed as a Special Research Director. She also currently lectured at the Sorbonne’s Curie University on biotechnology and viral editing. She had spoken at biological warfare conferences and worked with several French government agencies on weaponized viruses.

She must have top-level security clearance to have that level of access and trust.

X-Ray was able to access and understand her published research papers on genetic vaccines for haemorrhagic viruses. She had worked in this field for over 20 years had been researching ways of editing the genetic codes of those viruses for the purpose of vaccination. This required reducing their effectiveness and increasing the incubation time. Although somewhat successful, the research did not actually state whether she had produced a vaccine yet.

Frankie confirmed that she was a respected, leading specialist on the Marburg and related viruses, worked with PRX Biogenetics (with a hefty security clearance) and was closely linked to government bio-warfare defence programs, including the Euro- Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre.

Her social media presence was very limited but Frankie confirmed that it primarily contained a series of family photos, as well as confirming her home address.

X-Ray explained that Marburg was a haemorrhagic virus, which did not have an effective vaccine or treatment and was fatal in over 50% of cases. Symptoms included fever followed by excessive bleeding from orifices, including eyes, fingers and mouth, usually resulting in death in a week or more. It was passed by physical contact with infected patients and their blood. The Marburg virus normally incubated for several days or longer before the patient suffered the full effects and died.

Was this something vampires might be interested in? They were already physically dead and Banshee felt sure that they would be immune to most if not all diseases, though they could still be carriers.

Banshee asked Frankie if PRX Biogenetics could be the location shown on the floorplans? She confirmed that seemed likely.

While Banshee and X-Ray were communicating about the woman, Akira was still searching the apartment. He found several handguns and ammunition, gun oil and cleaning tools. They had been wiped clean of prints. Next to them were a number of Spanish passports with their photographs, but in new names. They were clearly forgeries, of poor quality and unlikely to pass inspection at immigration. These were gathered up anyway and distributed between them just in case they needed a second identity, even if they would never pass immigration.

It would mean that if someone came back, they would know someone else had been in the flat but they were starting to think this apartment was intended to frame them for a crime, but if so, what crime? Terrorism probably. It did fit the Carpathian connection as they already had them listed as terrorists in their country.

The kitchen confirmed their hypothesis. It had been turned into a chemical factory and stank to the high heavens of chlorine. Empty bottles of nail polish remover, bleach, and a number of other household chemicals were piled in one corner. On the table were the remains of wires and detonator packaging, and a white crystalline powder. Someone had been building an unstable homemade explosive such as might be used by terrorists.

The explosive device itself weren’t here, just the chemical remnants but, judging by the remains, there had been enough for a significant size explosion.

X-Ray found several debit card receipts and invoices for food and bleach with Stacy’s signature in the bin. All the signatures were identical and Brian suspected that they had been copied from a recent job application form.

In the bedroom, he found several strands of hair similar in colour and length to Stacy’s scattered over the bed. He wasn’t convinced they were hers but they definitely looked similar. If she was still in Kristal-mode getting her hair would have been impossible of course.

They were about to leave when they received a message over their commdots, but not from either Frankie or the Basemates. It was encrypted and in English. The comms program read it out. “Advise cleaning apartment up, leave no links that are fake or could identify you to reduce the heat when the police find the apartment.” Even Frankie didn’t know who had sent the message but whoever it was, was intimately familiar with the encryption they used in-house.

It was clearly sensible advice and they began gathering up anything that might led the Police to them. Twenty minutes into their clean up (gathering all the weapons and chemicals together as Akira had the idea to teleport them out of the apartment), another message appeared from the same anonymous source as before. “Sûreté on their way. Leave now. Head to Sorbonne Université tout suite, save Elana.”

They didn’t question the advice.  Then a few seconds later another text. This stated, “Be aware of Locard’s Exchange Principle.”

In forensic science, Locard’s Exchange Principle held that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something to the crime scene and will leave with something from it. It was originally devised by the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Lyon’, Dr Edmond Locard (1877–1966), a world-renowned criminologist.

They had to leave and figure out some way to hide any evidence that led to them as the culprits. In the end, Akira used the Airts of Ahgrazul, a spell used to guide travellers on the winding coils between worlds, to find a dead dimension. He opened a portal to it and cast the weapons and explosive components through it.

They couldn’t do anything about the smell of chemicals or trace elements but they could at least confuse their connection as this was clearly intended to incriminate them in whatever was going to happen. The passports, receipts and documents were leaving with them, as was the laptop, even as they heard the sound of Police sirens in the distance. Clearly, they had been set up and if the Police found any evidence of terrorist activity then the full weight of the law, French-style, would come crashing down on top of them. An empty flat even if the Police were suspicious meant reduced heat, or at least that was their mysterious advisor was recommending.

X-Ray unleashed a wave of low yield radiation to destroy any DNA in the apartment, including in the bedroom to fry any hair strands he might have missed, then did the same in each of the rooms before Akira turned them both invisible and they opened the apartment living room window.

The Parisian Police were pulling up outside and heading up the stairs with guns drawn. It was time to leave. The three of them, invisible once more, flew out and into the street intending to head towards the road marked on the map with a red X.

In a nearby alley, they saw three figures cowering in the shadows looking up at the open window expectedly. Their skin was grey, their eyes blood red and they had distorted ears; there was a lot that reminded them of the undead, of Nosferatu. So similar to the creature X-Ray had encountered in Stoke-on-Trent in fact, that the three of them could have been his brothers.

Banshee whispered that they weren’t the kidnappers, they had looked more normal than these three. Were there other parties involved in this and if so, why? As the three of them looked down, one of the creatures turned into mist and disappeared from sight. Akira whispered to the others, “I hate it when they do that!”

X-Ray noted that when they misted that his enhanced senses couldn’t see anything other the mist, there was no heartbeat he could detect in any of them and no heat traces, their bodies, even unmisted, matched the ambient heat around them. Thankfully, they didn’t appear to be able to see them while they were invisible either, though they had clearly reacted to the window being opened.

They decided to head towards where the X marks the spot. This was on Rue Boissonade, a quiet street near the University, hemmed in by buildings and closely parked cars on both sides. The street mostly consisted of apartment buildings as well as a small rundown, tourist guesthouse. At this time of evening, it was deserted.

As they got closer to the location they heard two bangs over the nearby rioting, either of a car backfiring or a couple of shots being fired, but there was no one present when they arrived. Presumably the shots, if that’s what they were, would be reported by someone and the Police would be on their way.

There was blood on the street, so not a car backfiring then, however, there were no bodies lying in the road. They spotted blood on a nearby parked car and, when they looked underneath, in the gutter they found two bullet cases and a discarded pistol, similar to one of the weapons from the apartment.

Scattered on the pavement nearby were scraps of plant matter, as if someone had shredded a bunch of flowers and hurled the remains from a balcony above. The plant matter appeared to be the remains of a bunch of snowdrops.

There were two sets of blood trails, one on each side of the street. The left trail was a spray from a high-speed wound, probably a gunshot. Blood drips showed the victim had moved fast along the sidewalk away from the attack, though this trail disappeared before it has gone far.  

The second blood trail on the right was closer to the bullet casings. From the spatter pattern, this was blood from multiple slow-speed wounds, perhaps from a knife or sharp object. They also spotted a blood smear on a nearby wall.  There was another bloodstain, much higher up on the wall — two stories up a sheer concrete wall.

They were alone in the street but they spotted an Audi TT automobile parked close by with a dash-cam pointed along the street towards the incident. Surprisingly, it was Akira that realised that the dash-cam has a Parking Mode that recorded movement near the car even when it was stationary. It was parked up and locked, but no lock had ever been designed to cope with a teleporter who could see his destination. Akira teleported inside and accessed the chip, replaying it on their recently acquired laptop.

The memory chip stored some ten hours of video, but thankfully, it was timestamped and Akira zoomed through the recording of someone, unseen, driving (badly) through busy Parisian traffic to the footage of the most recent activations. The unseen driver parked up on the street and the camera switched itself over to parking mode. There were a couple of brief movement activations for a few seconds when passing lorries must have shook the car. Then the camera switched itself on. Unfortunately, there was now a car parked directly in front of it, blocking some of the view.

On the left side facing the camera, it showed a smartly dressed woman, already stumbling, grasping a bloody shoulder wound, her mobile phone still in her hand. It was clearly the same woman, Morgane Le Corre, whose photo they seen in the apartment. Behind her could be seen a pair of Japanese tourists stepping out of a guesthouse looking up from their phones, surprised by the sudden violence. On the right side, too near the car to be seen completely, was a bald-headed figure dressed vaguely similar to Akira holding a pistol. A blurred figure passed over the hood of the car, slamming into the shooter, who was forced to fire his next shot into the air.

The Japanese tourists ducked behind a parked car, and the wounded woman ran off-camera. The last image before the camera turned off was of the shooter’s feet in the air as he was violently forced back by the blurry figure. The shooter was wearing shoes identical to Akira’s in style.

The attempted murderer had somehow ended up scaling the wall if the smeared blood traces were to be believed, but then what? The two Japanese tourists must have witnessed the incident, which had been caught on the dash- cam video.

Banshee was convinced they were caught between two different factions of vampires in some sort of war. They tried to follow the blood trail down the street but it quickly petered out. That was surprising as a shoulder wound that bad should have continued to bleed out but she appeared to have stopped the bleeding quickly somehow. Even if she’d managed to get a tourniquet on the wound, there would still have been some residual blood splatter so had she managed to heal herself somehow, or stop the bleeding? She clearly had been heading away in the same direction, away from the University shown on the map.

Time to question the tourists and find out what they had seen.  There were lights on at the guesthouse but first Akira asked Frankie to download Japanese onto his commdot to ease communication and anyway, Akira had always wanted to be able to speak Japanese.

After a brief negotiation with the youth on reception, they headed up to the couple’s bedroom.  It seemed the receptionist had heard the shots but hadn’t left the desk, though he admitted that he’d phoned the Police and they were on their way, assuming they could negotiate their way through the riots. No time to waste then, they headed up to the tourists room and knocked on the door. The couple peeked out and Akira started asking questions in fluent Japanese.

They appeared to be very nervous, particularly of Akira for some reason, but stated they wanted to help. They were scared by what they had seen and trying to decide what to do in this foreign country. With a little friendly persuasion, they agreed to speak with them. In perfect Japanese Akira asked them if they had seen him shoot the woman. Surprised, they replied that they had seen someone who looked a bit like him, mainly in the way he was dressed, but it hadn’t been him really, had it?

“No, it wasn’t me but how close in appearance was he?” The male responded by pulling out his phone and showing them a recording. It showed her looking at a map on her phone as her partner recorded her on his. The phone didn’t record the first shot but it could be heard in the background then the phone turned round and they saw an elderly person jump from the car bonnet onto the shooter and drag a man, similar in appearance to Akira, into the building, at which point the tourists must have ran away. They pointed out the window at the building opposite and explained he had gone up the outside of the building with the shooter.

“Like a spider?” asked Akira. They nodded yes. The three of them looked at the picture of the shooter again, yes he had been wearing a wrap round top similar to his, but he had been wearing jeans though his shoes were similarly laced up his legs and he had a baldhead and tanned skin, possibly Mediterranean in origin and had a similar build to Akira. The shooter had been covered in blood when the elderly man, the recording showed him as blurry in appearance, had dragged him effortlessly up the outside of the building.

Akira had to wonder why so many bald men were involved, were they priests perhaps or part of some sort of barber cult?

Down below they could hear sirens getting closer and realised it was time to leave. Akira thanked them in perfect Japanese as they left and the couple bowed in response.

The apartment building with the bloodstain was simple to enter, as the front door lock had been broken recently. Inside was a dark hallway, with stairs leading up to locked and empty apartments. There was an overwhelming stench of blood permeating the corridors.

Sprawled on the dusty stone floor at the shadowed back of the entrance hall was a dying male, He was in his late twenties, wearing a wraparound top, with bloodstained jeans tucked into laced up blood-splattered boots. He was bald, brown eyes, and has a serious tan. He was covered in blood, his own, and it had pooled around his body, running all over the floor. There were several large gashes on his face, neck and chest. He was clearly bleeding out.

He was whispering to himself as if praying, apparently in Greek. X-Ray asked Frankie for a Greek translation module but it was too late and the man had gone silent.

The wounds had severed major blood vessels and he had lost a lot of blood. X-Ray was sure that the wounds had been caused by a combination of a strong impact and a sharp, short blade or perhaps claws. There was livid bruising on his upper arms, where someone or something very strong had clearly gripped him through his clothes.

If X-Ray’s professional diagnosis was correct, he was beyond recovery; he had lost too much blood. Some of his shallower wounds should have clotted, but, oddly, hadn’t. A few seconds later he died.

They elected to search his pockets and found his mobile phone. The phone was locked, but X-Ray unlocked it with the victim’s fingerprint. While he was doing that the others discovered a rental Peugeot car key fob, marked WC-982-FG.

The phone was using a prepaid SIM card. It had received only a single text message, a single word, “Commence” sent from a French mobile number (Frankie subsequently tried to trace the phone but it turned out to be prepaid as well as switched off and therefore untraceable). There is also a secure messaging app installed called “Hush-Hush.”

Frankie informed them that this app was made by a Swiss company famous for their privacy. It allowed secure, encrypted communication between people and was popular in particular amongst the Swiss banking fraternity. Messages were automatically deleted 24 hours after being read. There was a short list of weirdly named contacts, presumably codenames, recorded with the last message date and some other metadata.

Frankie revealed there were only six people communicating using pseudonyms in the app group; all of whom had been active in the last few hours. One codenamed, Longinus has sent several photos, now stored in the phone. Akira remembered that Longinus had been the name given to the unnamed Roman soldier who’d supposedly pierced the side of Jesus with a lance while he hung on the cross.

The others also had Roman names. The one codenamed Brutus was apparently the one in charge. The other codenames used were Cimber, Galba, Cinna and Albinus, all names of Roman senators that had murdered Julius Caesar. A couple of the photos were of the road outside or long distance shots of the female, Morgane. The rest appeared to be of outdoor carparks across the city.

While the others were examining the body, Banshee was still wondering who their text-sending informant was. She suspected it was one of the vampire factions they’d previously encountered, but if that was the case how had they managed to access their communications channel and duplicate Annie and Frankie’s encryption?

The assassin’s similarity in appearance to Akira was also disconcerting and obviously deliberate. They were being set up; first the apartment and car rental, then this man’s deliberate attempt to look like one of the team. Akira seemed to just be happy that the dead body wasn’t actually him.

They left the body where it was and walked down to the street in search of the car. It would be better for the Police to find the corpse rather than expose themselves to further accusations.

The rental Peugeot, supposedly hired by Stacy, was parked just a street away. It had the registration WC-982-FG and they heard the beep when they pressed the unlock button on the key. X-Ray did a quick recce of the vehicle to make sure it wasn’t a trap, then opened the door.

Inside was a carry-on holdall on the back seat. X-Ray opened it to reveal a change of clothes, specifically a Greek Orthodox monk’s robe but saffron in colour, as well as plane tickets to Istanbul from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport in the name of Michaelakos Xenou, departing in a couple of hours’ time. The robes were stained around the hem with what appeared to be oil and rust.

With it was a Greek passport in his name listing his place of birth as ‘Athína’ (the Greek translator app that X-Ray had downloaded translated that as Athens) and listed his profession as ‘monachós’ (Greek for monk). The photo was the assassin’s own; the only feature he shared with Akira was his shaved head and tanned face.

There was a car rental document in Stacy’s name, which appeared to have been booked online before being printed off and listed her home address as the apartment they had visited earlier. He also had a stack of ‘Easy’ (EC) Credits in the bag hidden beneath the clothes.

Surprisingly, there was also a small tree sapling, ready for planting attached to a planting stake that been sharpened. Bunches of snowdrops had been wrapped around the stakes’ handle.

There had been similar plant remnants at the assassination site. They contacted Frankie and a few seconds later, she informed them that several books on occult studies identified snowdrops with ‘moly’, a magical herb from Greek myth. Moly was said to protect against Circe, a Greek goddess of magic and the supernatural – could there be something behind the myth connected to vampires?

Akira lent in and allowed his ability to view the past to surface. He found himself viewing the peace and tranquillity that results from spending the last several years of monastic life. Brother Michaelakos was at peace, a distant memory of experiencing a previous existence as a soldier in a brutal war, had been finally laid to rest by his simple lifestyle.

 Then that tranquillity was breached when he visited Paris the previous year. Something surfaced. Anxiety and apprehension at his life as a monk sundered by a ‘mission’. A vision of meeting other shadowy figures in the back of a container or truck and a sense that this would be a holy crusade, even if it meant using his warrior skills to kill ‘the woman’ before she succeeding in killing the whole of humanity on behalf of the dead that walked the Earth. The memories Akira encountered confirmed his target was Morgane Le Corre, the woman in the photos. There was no memory of his actually meeting the woman.

As Akira surfaced back in the present, X-Ray grabbed the bag, putting everything back in it as a middle-aged man in a stained, rumpled raincoat appeared in the gloom of the streetlights at the end of the street. He walked towards them, the tip of his cigarette glowing as Frankie informed them that there was little public information about Michaelakos Xenou, apart from a Greek birth certificate that matched the information in his passport. He had no social media presence and seemingly lived a monastic life though Frankie had been unable to discover what religious sect he was with. The only anomaly that she could find was a record in the French immigration systems showing that he had passed through Charles de Gaulle airport immigration the previous year, before departing three weeks later.

The man continued walking towards them, his cigarette apparently a Gauloises was unfiltered and made with dark tobaccos from Syria and Türkiye, which produced a strong distinctive aroma.

He smiled. It was not a friendly smile. He reached into his pocket and produced an identity card which he flashed in front of their faces even as he took a deep puff of his cigarette before speaking.

Akira knew that there were two main divisions of French police, the Gendarmerie Nationale and the Police Nationale, still referred to as the Sûreté.

He identified himself, “Lieutenant Faye Brigade Criminelle of the Sûreté, and you are the Balance, non?” Brigade Criminelle were the French murder detectives though there were overlapping areas of responsibility and interagency competition with other departments.

Akira replied “Oui?”

“You are in this country illegally, are you not?”

“Perhaps” was Akira’s reply.

“We are looking at a report of shots being fired in this area, and who do I find but you three. surprendre! You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”

“No, sorry, we’re not here on business.”

Faye turned to Banshee and X-Ray, “And the costumes, they are for Halloween I assume? Your calendar, it is wrong I think. Had you come through Customs properly, I’m sure you would have been allowed to enter my beautiful and peaceful city…” He ignored the sound of rioting that was still occurring in the distance.

“So, I’m not going to arrest you for that ‘délit’, how you say? Misdemeanour but your names, they have appeared several times amongst my informants in connection with a possible murder and now I find you near the scene of shots that have been fired. Coincidence? I think not!”

He looked at the Peugeot. “This car, she is yours?”

 Akira pretended it wasn’t theirs but Faye merely reached over and checked it was locked then nodded. “The theft of a car is long way beneath you, surely?”

“No, it was illegally hired in the name of someone we know and you need to be aware that someone is trying to, if you excuse my French, ‘fit us up’.

Faye’s face displayed what might best be described as a disdainful smirk, “Oui, that impression I got also. They are clumsy in how they pile on the evidence against you, or would have had not most of that evidence disappeared mysteriously like a magician’s ‘le lapin’, how do you say? The rabbit in the hat? Leaving only a bad smell of bleach behind?”

Akira had to hide his smirk. The Police had clearly found the apartment, but of course, their clean-up had meant all the ‘evidence’ had vanished before they got there, thanks to Akira’s dimensional portal and X-Ray’s radiation scouring.

He confirmed their suspicion, “We were told by an informer that an apartment rented by a ‘femme anglaise’ who was believed to be linked to yourselves, a Stacy Wellingham, had evidence, including weapons there that linked to a planned assassination that proved your involvement and guilt. Why people with your abilities would require weapons makes no sense but that was what they said, yet when we arrived, we found nothing that confirmed this beyond an overwhelming stench of bleach in the air. To add to the mystery, the informant, he has disappeared.”

Arika agreed that they would have no need of weapons. Faye smiled, “You obviously have none concealed about your body. Should you come across any information you will contact me personally, understood? Yes?”

X-Ray felt sure that this man, this Lieutenant Faye, could be trusted even if he were clearly ambitious and was working hard to make a name for himself. He decided to trust him, in part at least. “We’re searching for a friend of ours who has gone missing. This car was rented in her name but she didn’t rent it. Same as an apartment she’s supposed to have rented. We think she’s in danger and want to find her. We think someone is trying to frame us and we weren’t supposed to find out until it was too late, but someone seems to be on our side.”

“Ah, la fantôme, she warned me to not make assumptions as to your guilt. No, I cannot say more. You have not approached the local Police? I have not heard anything. Be aware, I will be keeping my eye on you. This is France not England. It is not your jurisdiction so if you find anything suspicious report it you must to Le Brigade Criminelle at once. This is my personal number, call me. The regular Police would, I’m sure, be annoyed at your involvement, especially as you are here without the authorisation, the permission, of le Chevaliers, yes?” He lent in closer. “To be honest, they are une bande d’idiots, comprende?”

He produced a scuffed up card from his coat pocket, which read Lieutenant Emil Faye and listed his contact details. “Keep in touch and no trouble in my city, s’il vous plaît.” He muttered as he handed it over and then headed towards the scene of the shooting and the small trail of blood on the ground as he could be heard on his radio requesting a house-to-house search of the area and stating he had no witnesses or suspects, at the moment.

Time to leave the area before they found the monk’s body.

It was time they found the intended victim. The blood trail on the ground led towards what appeared on their map to be an apartment block and Frankie confirmed her home address in the Pernety Quartier shown on the map. They made their way there.

Morgane’s apartment was a luxury affair on the top floor of a seven-storey block of apartments. Security cameras watched the building entrance and seemingly the hallway and there was a young man behind the reception desk.

They decided to fly up and peak through the windows first. Heavy drapes hung in front of the floor to ceiling windows concealing the interior. Through gaps in the curtains, they could just make out that the apartment had wide doors, high ceilings, and expensive furniture in a large living room. Through the gloom, they could make out several doors leading off the living area, presumably to other rooms.

Banshee phased them inside. They quickly looked around the living room. There were a number of photos of a younger Morgane with a man of similar age and a young son; going by their fashion choices, the photos appeared to have been taken about twenty years before.

Frankie hacked into the French records office and found her family details. Her husband and young son lived in Paris but died in 2003 and 2002 respectively. Her son died of blood loss due to an undiagnosed haemophiliac complication after a small fall.

As a doctor, X-Ray was aware that some haemophilia conditions were genetic and primarily affected males. As though in confirmation, Frankie confirmed that her husband had died of unstoppable blood loss after a car accident, though there was no haemophiliac history in either family.

Background research and a deep dive web-search by their AI, Frankie discovered that PRX Biogenetics had employed her since 2008 and from 2017 as a Special Research Director. She also currently lectured at the Sorbonne’s Curie University on biotechnology and viral editing. She had spoken at several biological warfare conferences and worked with a number of French government agencies on weaponised viruses. She must have high-level security clearance to have that level of access and trust.

X-Ray noted that she had published several research papers on genetic vaccines for haemorrhagic viruses having worked in this field for over 20 years. She had research papers published on ways of editing the genetic codes of those viruses for the purpose of vaccination. This required reducing their effectiveness and increasing the incubation time. Although somewhat successful, the research did not actually state whether she had ever produced a vaccine.

Frankie confirmed that she was a respected, leading specialist on Marburg and related viruses with PRX Biogenetics (with a hefty security clearance), and was closely linked to government bio-warfare defence programs, including the Euro- Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre.

Banshee looked around but there was no obvious sign that anyone else was there, though of course they could be asleep in one of the bedrooms.

They checked the bathroom next and found a bloody handprint on the sink, roughly the same size as Morgane’s. Sitting by the taps of the sink was a medicine bottle, which X-Ray identified as a drug used by haemophiliacs to help their blood clot normally. There were several more bottles of the same drug in the bathroom cabinet. Akira immediately helped himself to three of them just in case it might prove useful or necessary later.

Akira walked back into the living room, calmed his heart and again tried to view the recent past to see when she’d last been in the apartment. He ‘saw’ something that didn’t make sense. He saw Morgane walking into the apartment a few hours before. She looked exhausted and headed towards the bedroom. Then the front door opened again recently and again Morgane entered from the hallway even though she clearly had never left the apartment. Her clothes were identical, but this time she was holding a bloody cloth over a seeping wound just above her heart. She walked over to the bathroom and entered. Next thing he ‘saw’ two Morgane’s in the bedroom, one in the bed and the other, the one with the bloody clothes leaning over her, whispering in her ear as the other closed her eyes and appeared to fall into a deep if troubled sleep.

The vision faded only to be replaced by one of the Morgane’s leaving the apartment, talking on her phone something about needing an ‘extraction’. Akira mentally surfaced, unable to read anything else from the room. Two of them? He shared what he’d ‘seen’ with the others.

They checked the bedroom and discovered Morgane asleep on a queen-size bed. The bed had clearly only ever been slept on one side only, no regular overnight companions then. She had no obvious wounds and she appeared to be either a very deep sleeper or comatose as she failed to wake up when they entered the room and approached the bed. X-Ray checked her shoulder; no wounds or bandages, she was uninjured. Next, he checked her ambient heat traces to see if they were abnormal but they were what he would expect from a living body though on the lower side of the body scale. He touched her hands. They were cold; did that also reflect the coldness of her heart, he wondered? She otherwise appeared healthy though her breathing was shallow.

She still hadn’t awoken and X-Ray was now of the opinion that she had to have been hypnotised or drugged. He checked her arms, wrists and neck for puncture wounds but discovered nothing untoward. He let out a sigh of relief. Her pulse was slow but regular. The only thing wrong with her was her failing to wake up.

Again, Akira tried to read her past by laying his hands on her arm. He wanted to go back as far as he could, despite such a deep dive into her past could mean he risked losing himself in her memories.

His mind left the present and his own consciousness as he drowned in her past. He immediately got a strong impression of loss, of feeling abandoned when her husband and son died, the grief was overwhelming. Then a feeling of her wanting revenge against the rest of humanity for being so unfeeling and cold. He could sense that she’d made a faustian bargain involving something called MAR-VX. Both her husband and her son had died through bleeding out and in revenge she planned do the same to the rest of humanity. The specific details were lost in a mental mist but she was the intelligence behind this MAR-VX. Then there was something she referred to in her mind as the Pale Brotherhood.

He surfaced with a shudder with a final vision of red, blood-coloured eyes and feeling a command to sleep. Akira informed his two companions of what he’d sensed. Had the eyes belonged to a shapeshifting vampire? If so, who and what side were they on other than their own? What did worry them was the fact that she had no memory of Stacy at all.

Banshee checked out a photo album that she had left beside her bed. It contained older photos of Morgane and her husband getting married, living a normal life, having a son; the later photos were all scenic pictures of Greek and Roman ruins, seemingly tourist sites, but not popular ones, from all over Greece, Italy and Asia Minor.

A search of her room revealed several expensive dresses and business suits hanging in the wardrobe but there was a pile of bloody clothes lying on the floor to one side of the wardrobe, concealed by a towel. These matched Morgane’s smart business suit from the dash-cam video. The left shoulder had bloodstains and a bullet hole but there was not as much blood as they would have expected.  Then Akira noticed a bulging cloth bag hanging in the back of the wardrobe. It contained a saffron-coloured veil, a half-black half-white face mask, and a black and white robe.

Akira pulled it out and examined it, electing to keep it with him.

Frankie confirmed that the saffron veil and black and white clothing were characteristic of Melinoe, a minor Greek underworld goddess who presided over sacrifices to ghosts of the dead and brought nightmares and madness. Could Morgane be a believer in a cult? Akira tried the robe on and got a vision of claustrophobic catacombs, dark tunnels, secretive meetings far underground and blood-letting which seemed to confirm his impression of this being linked to a mystery cult. Of a robed man in a mask, holding a bowl containing milk mixed with blood taken from self-imposed wounds in their left hands. The congregation were coming forward to sip from the bowl. He shuddered at the nasty blood magic connected to the robe. He surfaced once more and muttered that they needed to gate crash one of their parties as he thought that the cult might know where Stacy was being held captive.

He then tried reading the bloody clothes and immediately felt trapped, entombed for a very long time, for millennia. Starved, thirsty then relief and to Akira’s surprise he saw both himself and Banshee’s faces appear and a sense of salvation was immediately replaced with intense penetrating pain and a need to escape. It was all muddled up as though the clothes had merely absorbed flashes of memory from its wearer as Akira was forced to resurface into the present immediately. 

They had been the memories of Elana, Countess Dolengen of Gratz, their missing bride of that he was now sure. She’d seen both of them before when they’d tried to rescue her from the monastery crypt and she was now shapeshifted into the double of the woman in the bed. Why though? What were her motives? Now that was clear in his mind Akira realised that there had been a sense of urgency mixed into his reading of her bloody clothes, something about stopping the world from ending, and the few remaining survivors being treated as cattle to be milked for their blood. He shuddered remembering his teammate’s account of their visit to a future where vampires had ruled.

They had to find out where this MAR-VX was being stored, presumably it was in the biogenetics lab where she worked. Banshee contacted Frankie for the address. Meanwhile they continued their search of the apartment.

Hanging on the wall was a large street-art style print of an angelic woman standing on a mountain looking out over fields. There was a stencilled drawing of a man and a woman dressed in the style of Ancient Greece walking up a set of stairs on the bottom of the artwork, seemingly a tag used by the artist instead of a signature. It was the same image Akira had ‘seen’ painted on the tunnel walls of his vision as he’d read the robe he was now wearing.

As they searched, Frankie explained that the PRX Biogenetics website stated that the company performed research into vaccines and treatments for Ebola-type haemorrhagic fevers. Company records at the French official register, Info Greffe, showed that PRX Biogenetics had been founded in 1995 and was owned by Eurydice Investments, a Spanish investment company. It has an address in the La Défense suburb in Northwest Paris. It was registered as a biosecurity level four facility, the highest and most strictly controlled.

That level of security allowed the lab, assuming it was authorised, to hold the most virulent diseases and chemicals. It would have to have strong environmental control systems and security to obtain that level of clearance.

Frankie noted that hidden in PRX Biogenetics’ HR records, they had sponsored several work visas for “agricultural chemists” from Russia, which was surprising as the West was far more advanced in agricultural chemistry. They were still being paid – with payments going to Carpathian branches of their banks!

Banshee changed back into Mary and produced her pendant with Stacy’s scarf still attached and again tried to dowse for her location. After several random swings, it began to swing towards the Latin Quarter of the city. Mary was sure that Stacy was somewhere within the city itself, she was unable to pin it down but it had been a much stronger impression this time.

X-Ray meanwhile searched the office and found it contained floor to ceiling shelves filled with biology and genetics reference books and journals as well as a large collection of books on Greek mythology. Many of the research papers were on the Marburg virus, as well as a collection of older unpublished research papers including several reports mentioning “the variant.”

A quick skim of several of the older reports seemed to indicate that this variant was fast-acting and airborne, as opposed to the slower and skin-to-skin transmitted Marburg virus.

There was the sound of a phone receiving texts coming from beneath the bed. They pulled it out and discovered that it was password-protected. Another reading of the past, this time of the phone, revealed the code needed to unlock it.

Once it was operational, they found that there was a recent text conversation with a Spanish phone number started only a short time before. As Morgane clearly hadn’t sent any of the recent messages then it was clear that someone had cloned her phone and was pretending to be her. Elana possibly? This phone however was also receiving the duplicate texts.

The first message, supposedly from Morgane and timed minutes after the assassination attempt read, “Been shot at. Help ASAP. Descending to Elysium.”

A reply a few seconds later read, “Suspect Natalie?” then another text message from the same Spanish number, arrived: “STAY THERE. EXTRACTION TEAM ON WAY. CODENAME TAXUS.”

Frankie noted that le Champs-Élysées, one of the major roads in central Paris, translated as ‘Elysian Fields’ in English, but it is never called Elysium and there were no underground tombs located beneath it. It was, however just one of the many Greek links with Paris.

Who was Natalie? Elysium had to a specific location in the catacombs surely, but first they planned to visit the laboratory.

When they arrived, they saw that the PRX Biogenetics offices consisted of a modern, white two-story building, slightly off the main thoroughfares near La Grande Arche. The offices had a public, pedestrian entrance with a visitor carpark at the front, and a secured gate to a small delivery yard at the back. This matched the floor plan from the apartment. The ground floor appeared to be primarily meeting rooms and storerooms at the front with the rear half housing the secure biological lab, with delivery yard access. The lab had to have airlock entrances, its own power, and air conditioning with upgraded filters. The upper floor had to be the usual administrative, management, and IT offices. The external windows were frosted armoured glass so they couldn’t see if anyone was still inside.

Due to the risk from the lethal diseases (and threats from animal rights protesters), security at PRX Biogenetics had to be tight.

The roof of the building had extensive air conditioning units, with integrated furnaces on the roof, as part of its biosecurity provisions. There was a roof skylight over the reception area with its security personnel, with a two-story drop to the floor.

Banshee turned X-Ray and herself both insubstantial and invisible and they headed to the roof, followed by an invisible Akira. Once up there, Banshee phased them both in – avoiding the psi-interference generators on the ground level secure areas designed to make it difficult to phase or teleport in from outside the building.

Inside, security guards were patrolling the office areas, but hopefully not the laboratory. That was likely covered by a network of CCTV cameras. Banshee again phased them through the floor and into a secure area on the floor below.

There was a fire door nearby propped open and the cameras had been rendered inoperable – it looked like someone else has already got in before them. They headed towards the secure research computers and storage area for the virus material where they could hear sounds of someone doing something inside.

The laboratory was all white, clean, and state of the art. All doors were air-tight, with thick glass windows and covered in extensive warning signs written in French. The rear and front entrances consisted of armoured airlocks, which were located next to the staff showers and decontamination scrubs. There were several servers in a white room next to the entrance to the main lab area.

Inside the storage area they could make out the silhouettes of two men crouched down by the large secure freezers connecting up some sort of homemade device to it.

As Banshee phased herself and her companions through the airlock and into the main lab. Inside, there was an almost overpowering acrid chemical smell in the air, similar to the smell in the apartment. They felt they had to stop them as this had to be a bomb they were connecting.

They had the advantage that the team were both insubstantial and invisible and the saboteurs were unaware of their presence. Akira suggested they appear suddenly and grab them before they could activate the bomb. Akira materialised and grabbed at the one that looked as though he was a lab technician, only for him to stumble in fright at the sudden appearance even as X-Ray managed to grip the ‘security guard’.

Caught by surprise the technician dropped the device and it activated causing a massive explosion that killed both him and his companion and destroyed the lab. There was a rumbling roar, then the whole building shook, glass shattered and furniture flew across the room. This was followed a second later by a number of secondary explosions throughout the building as the first bomb set of a chain reaction of explosions across the facility. It seemed that the plan had been to destroy the facility entirely, regardless of the collateral cost to the staff still inside.

X-Ray had projected a protective grav-bubble around the three of them instinctively even as Akira opened a portal behind them, back to Morgane’s apartment. The force of the initial blast knocked them through it. There was no time to rescue the two saboteurs who were both evaporated in the explosion. The last thing they noticed as the flames seared the apartment furniture and the portal sealed was that the sirens and fire suppression systems had failed to work but the bio-containment systems had immediately swung into action as the fridges sealed and its contents were destroyed automatically to prevent accidental dispersal of the viruses stored in the facility.

X-Ray immediately irradiated the room, giving Banshee and Akira an instant doze of sunburn but ensuring nothing biological had come through with them. Akira then immediately began extinguishing the fires their spontaneous arrival had caused to the living room furniture. In the distance, they could hear the sound of the several secondary explosions as the flames lit up the night sky even this far away.  Within minutes, they could hear the sound of fire engines and Police rushing to the scene. Akira sent a text to Jeeves including their current geolocation in case they needed to establish an alibi.

The explosion was loud enough to be heard across the whole city. They were later to discover that TV news crews had reported it as a major terrorist attack on PRX Biogenetics. Sirens and chaos reigned around the site for several hours until the fire finally burned itself out.

As they finished putting out the fires that their arrival had brought with them, the real Morgane emerged from the bedroom and looked around at her guests. She didn’t appeared to be surprised or frightened by their presence as she asked who they were and why they were in her apartment.

Akira continued patting out a small fire on her sofa and explained in translated French, “We’re the good guys. We’re here because of the fire.” and pointed at the scorched sofa. “We smelt smoke and gained access to protect you.”

Surprisingly, instead of challenging them she headed towards the apartment door muttering, “I have to go, I have to leave now.” Akira asked where to but she ignored him completely as she reached for the door handle only for the door to open of its own volition. She half turned and asked “Why? What business is it of yours?”

“We’re trying to protect you” was his reply. “You don’t realise you were in danger. Someone came while you were asleep and tried setting fire to your apartment. You can see where the fires were before we extinguished them. If we hadn’t been here to put it out, you’d have been cooked. You can trust us.” A look of bewilderment crossed her face, “How did you get in here in the first place? My door was locked.” Akira smiled, “We’re accredited superheroes, here to save you…” As soon as she heard them say they were superheroes, she made a dash for the door, which had drifted open further.

X-Ray tried to use his gravi-kinesis to pull her back in but instead something appeared to have blocked the energy wave by intercepting it. A misty figure appeared to be successfully blocking his attempt to restrain her. It was similar to a gaseous mist in composition but a mist that seemed to be sentient enough to block his attempts to grab Morgane.

Akira went invisible intending to follow her but as he tried to move towards the door something blocked his passage and flung him back violently.

As they looked, a gaseous figure appeared out of the mist, the face human but both ancient and distorted. A vampire, ancient and altered by the influence that a millennia of being undead had started to partially materialise in front of them as Morgane escaped down the stairs. 

The vampire rushed towards X-Ray and he could feel its mental influence saturate his mind but managed to shake of the desire to comply with it, even if he couldn’t remember what it was ordering him to do. He felt lightheaded and giddy while he tried to shake off the compulsion to obey him. In response, X-Ray dropped his kinesis and unleashed a blast of ultra-violet radiation instead.

It clearly weakened the creature as it was forced to disperse again into mist but was otherwise unhurt by the attack. In fairness, X-Ray had been shaking off the effects of the attack on him when he’d tried to focus on replicating a specific form of radiation.

Banshee unleashed a Wail at it. The sonic attack made it flee. Akira rushed out into the corridor just in time to see the lift doors close. He rushed back to the others, told them to turn invisible with him as he opened a portal to the street and waited for Morgane to exit so they could follow her.

They couldn’t shake the impression that she was being accompanied by other vampires but if so, they kept their distance and appeared unaware that the Balance was following on behind.

Muttering about ‘seeking a safe house’, she made her way towards the Seine. The closer she got to the river, the closer the mists got to her as though forming a protective shield around her but she appeared to ignore them.

She headed towards several locked green stalls attached to the railings on either side of the River Seine near Notre Dame. It was Akira that realised that they were Bouquiniste stalls, second-hand booksellers. She approached the one with the overhead sign that read “Gerard Duvant, Bouquiniste, spécialité occulte” on the south side (left bank) of the Seine.

She unlocked the door and stepped inside. The three of them went to follow but several vampires partially materialised between them and the stall.

“Hope we don’t have to pay for any property damage’ muttered X-Ray as he prepared to unleash a more focused UV blast. Thankfully, they were still invisible and currently undetectable. The three of them unleashed their attacks together. Banshee screamed out her Wail, which dazed one who partially materialised causing the other, younger vampire to flee. Two others had also been affected by the scream and clutched at their ears. Meanwhile X-Ray let fly with his blast at the oldest vampire. The blast missed him but affected some of the others burning their skin or staggering the younger vampires.

Akira began to manifest the Chains of Kar’Kradas in an attempt to wrap the vampires in chain-like bonds forged of pure darkness as it had the benefit that it affected those who were insubstantial such as vampires in mist form. The chains materialised and wrapped around them rendering one of the vampires immobile and forcing him to dissipate. It missed the other ancient but immobilised another vampire.

One of the vampires rushed towards where X-Ray was standing, intent on draining him or at least letting him bleed out. His teeth bit into his neck and he felt his blood soak into his costume as he managed to push the now substantialised vampire away. Thankfully, the bite hadn’t pierced any of his arteries. He unleashed his UV blast at the vampire who’d bitten him and turned him into dust. Banshee unleashed another wail and the remaining vampires fled.

The rushed inside and looked around the piles of books and garish tourist trash but Morgane had vanished. A quick search of the stall failed to reveal any trapdoors and Akira was left with the opinion that she had either been flown out of the rear window, which overlooked the river or had been teleported away. He was reasonably sure she lacked the ability to escape that way on her own so again the vampires must have assisted her.

They did notice that someone, the owner presumably, was selling prints of street art, each with the same sigil of two people ascending a set of stairs instead of a signature. It was a link with Morgane, if only they knew why. They also found a black and white mask, similar to the one Akira had obtained from Morgane’s wardrobe next to a business card for a wine merchants, Angelo’s Cave du Vin and address on Boulevard Edgar Quinet, Montparnasse.

Akira masked up and cast the Compass of Ahgrazul, a pathfinding spell, able to guide the caster to a desired destination, in this case to see if Morgane had been teleported and if so to where so he could follow it. As he cast the spell, he opened a portal to nowhere and the three of them stepped through. The compass directed the portal to a wine shop opposite the Montparnasse Cemetery. The shop’s walls were decorated with street art with the now familiar tag of two people ascending a set of stairs.

Banshee turned into Mary and began dowsing for Stacy. The pendant swing was almost instantaneous and almost tore the pendant from her fingers as it directed them away from the shop into the depths of the cemetery.

There were a number of people gathering near the shop in hooded capes who then proceeded into the Montparnasse Cemetery. The graveyard was crowded with stone graves, some belonging to French celebrities or heroes, including artists and philosophers and was surrounded by high walls and overhanging trees. Opposite the shop was a tree-lined road through the cemetery, the Rue Emile Richard, with impoverished tents on either side, its ‘citizens’ appeared to be ignoring the procession.

Wearing the costume he’d ‘borrowed’ from Morgane’s apartment, Akira joined the precession as they filed out of the shop and entered the Montparnasse Cemetery opposite, their leader unlocking a pedestrian gate with an old key. Turning back into Banshee, she and X-Ray tagged along invisibly.

Most of the entrances to the catacombs they passed hadwelded bars blocking off the entrances as they walked through the tombs to the round tower of an old windmill in the Southeast corner and began their descent having put their masks on.

In the basement floor of the restored windmill, a hidden trapdoor covered spiral stone stairs leading down twenty metres to the bone-filled catacombs. Underground the mine workings were chaotic, following seams of limestone. Several of the tunnels they passed ended in dead-ends, had holes down to a lower level, or opened into irregular larger spaces. The tunnel they followed was often only wide enough for a single person, with low ceilings. The catacombs had piles of human bones along the walls or covering the floor, sometimes arranged into patterns or covering other tunnels. In the upper levels, graffiti and wall art was common, as well as rubbish left by other explorers and their strange habits. The air was humid and all contact with Frankie was lost.

There were several scrawled images and messages on the walls signed with the now familiar graffiti tag of the man and woman ascending. They passed a flooded passage with muddy waist-deep water only to then hear music and, in the distance, lights illuminating a secret rave room filled with spaced-out dancers and strobe lights. Crumbling skulls and bones were everywhere as they headed deeper into the ground

The single entrance ahead of them was blocked by a large, locked metal door, behind which chanting can be heard. Above the door were carved the words, “The Place of the Dead.”

They had to enter one at a time and found themselves in a large underground room.

The chamber was a large space, with several pillars supporting a low roof, the walls were covered in real skulls and bones, most brown and old, others whiter and newer and the smell of incense hung heavy in the air. One wall had a large mural of large green fields populated by ghostly figures created by the same artist who used the tag of two people fleeing up a set of stairs. Incense and oil lights burned in wall alcoves.

The cultists already present were seemingly performing a ritual to celebrate the dead. The cultists wore flowing head to toe robes and a stylised white or black mask with eyeholes, many of whom were bleeding from their left palm. The hierophant held a bowl of milk mixed with blood and allowing the gathered supplicants to drink from it even as they poured a little on to the ground they were kneeling on. Akira assumed they had to be witnessing a libation ritual, pouring milk as sacrifice to a god or hero. Blood was normally only used in times of war.

Behind the priest were three shrines, topped with mummified corpses, presumably the heroes they were worshipping.

The next thing the three of them saw was an unconscious, seemingly hypnotised but no longer crystalline Stacy lying on a nearby bench, handcuffed to one of its legs. In front of her stood two physically identical Morgane’s, arguing.

The new arrivals seemed to be surprised at finding Stacy. They clearly had no idea who the woman handcuffed to the bench was or why she was handcuffed. She has been unconscious since they had arrived and at their hierophant’s urging had left her alone.

As soon as the masked and hooded Akira got close enough the Morgane standing closest to Stacy turned and cried out “Akira!” For a split second, her irises turned red. The other Morgane asked “I don’t recognise you, are you here looking for me? Are you part of the extraction team?” before she realised what the other version of her had said.

Akira tried to bluff by stating, “Yes, I am the extraction team.” “Just one person?” was her bewildered response. “I’m quite capable of extracting as many teeth as necessary all on my own,” he said as he let rip with his mystical blast at both Morgane’s. “Better safe than sorry,” he murmured as he fired. The blast at the red-eyed Morgane missed but he hit the other one, knocking her down and dazing her.

X-Ray materialised as he stepped away from Banshee and targeted the cult leader, the hierophant holding the bowl, with his gravi-kinesis. The priest found himself raised off the ground and flung unceremoniously across the chamber as X-Ray rushed across to a still unconscious Stacy. The red-eyed Morgane reached down and touched her, “It’s okay, she’ll be fine, she’s just unconscious but she will wake up in a few minutes.” X-Ray reached over and grabbed the handcuffs to see how strong they were.

Banshee rushed over towards the dazed Morgane and grabbed her, unleashing a corrupting touch on her. It caused her to collapse unconscious even as men in bulletproof vests and armed with handguns began to enter the chamber, admittedly one after the other due to the narrowness of the chamber door, seemingly looking for Morgane. On entering and seeing Morgane collapse to the ground the first one fired blandly towards X-Ray but hit the red-eyed version instead. To X-Ray’s surprise the bullet hit but instead of blood gushing out there was only a slight blood flow from the wound and the woman remained standing though she looked dazed or stunned. X-Ray raised his force field and positioned himself between the shooter and his wife, then unleashed his kinesis against the shooter. He rose into the air and slammed into a nearby pillar breaking his arm, unfortunately not the one holding the pistol.

The gathered cultists began to panic with some trying to run towards the only exit, currently blocked by the gunmen, while others tried to hide behind the pillars or fallen rocks.

The next attacker entered and fired off his pistol at a now substantialised Banshee. It missed and Banshee turned insubstantial again and responded with a Wail unleashed at those gathered in the door. The first gunman buckled and dropped unconscious and the gunman behind him also collapsed. 

The doorway was total anarchy as several of the cultists tried to get through to escape while the extraction team gathered, blocking the door to fire in the general direction of the Balance and using the cultists as human shields. 

Akira dodged a shot and blasted the remaining gunmen. The first shot knocked one of them into the doorway hard allowing a couple of the cultists gathered at the door to clamber over him and vanish down the tunnel even as Akira’s other shots missed their target as he was forced to aim high so as to not hit them accidentally. One of the gunmen tried to hit Elana again as a shielded X-Ray tried to interpose himself in front of her and Stacy.

He fired an energy blast at the shooter but missed due to the flickering candlelight as Banshee unleashed another Wail and knocked X-Ray’s attacker unconscious as another dropped to the ground, bleeding from his ears. Akira took out the final member and he too collapsed.

Elana turned to her usual form in front of them and advised them to “Let the cultists go, they are completely oblivious to what had been going on. They were pawns. Do you know if the research centre was destroyed?”

“Yes, big boom, spectacular lights and fireworks and, unfortunately, several deaths.” Was Akira’s reply.

She explained that she had learnt about the plan to commit worldwide genocide with this mutated virus by a shadowy cabal of ancient vampires known as the Pale Brotherhood, so she elected to try to stop them by working with a group of human dissidents who had also learnt about the plan. Unfortunately, her old master (Dracula presumably?) had discovered her involvement and had assumed the worse, that she had beome a member of the Pale Brotherhood and he elected to try to stop it while hoping to recapture her and absorb her abilities at the same time. To his Machiavellian viewpoint, it must have made sense to try to lay any blame for preventing the plan at the feet of the Balance. He’d arranged for the monk to assassinate the real Morgane and lay the blame for her death on them. Instead he’d shot her while she was impersonating the real one.

She pointed at the unconscious Morgane on the ground, “To prevent this from happening again, she must die. She’s their repository of knowledge and provided the skills that converted the Soviet version of the virus with its 50% death rate to the VX variant with its 99% death rate leaving just 1% of the human population as cattle to be bleed for their vampire masters. Drakul would have wanted to ensure this failed if for no other reason that he wanted his food supply to continue. The Council was not in favour of him and in such a world would have left him and his followers to starve, deprived of blood.

The Marburg virus was a naturally occurring haemorrhagic disease similar to Ebola; she must not be allowed to survive to restart the process of converting the Soviet version of the virus into VX again. The V variant of the MAR virus was obtained from Russia through Carpathia and they may be able to get more in time.”

Elana explained that The Brotherhood had obtained the MAR-V virus from some ex-Soviet biopreparat source, based out of Moscow. All she knew about its origin was the name “Sobotsky”.

The MAR-V variant was airborne and more virulent. Some people were affected immediately, others appear to be uninfected for days or weeks (a longer incubation period was better to spread the disease). The fatality rates were as high as 50%. This was initially stored at their Carpathian facility before they were sent to Paris. Thankfully, all the company’s stock of Mar-VX had been in the PRX Biogenetics lab – they would have to go back to the Russians to get more of the V variant.

The MAR-VX variant had been secretly developed by PRX Biogenetics and was a weaponised variant of the Marburg virus. VX was an enhanced airborne variant. The estimated human fatality rate was nearly 100%, with no effective treatment. It was clear that had this been released into the atmosphere it would be a global catastrophe.

Morgane and her colleagues had modified MAR-V into MAR-VX using a reagent provided by the vampires. Some sort of plant extract – she doesn’t know where it came from.

Elana was for killing her  as they couldn’t allow her to go free to continue her work for the Pale Brotherhood, They argued about the morality of killing for the greater good. While they struggled to find an acceptable solution, Akira made a decision and accepted the weight on his karma as he elected to use a dark spell on Morgane to disarm her mind.

He called upon the Howling Dream. This was as much a place or state of mind as it was an entity. It was mad, primal chaos dwelling within the darkest depths of someone’s darkest consciousness, the stormy sea of emotions and awareness from which all thought and imagination first arose. It was that portion of the Great Collective consciousness that could not be tamed or subject to order. It was insanity incarnate. Mages calling on the power of the Howling Dream skirted the edges of madness themselves but by traversing it they gained access to the Crying Road, a path into the realm of dreams and nightmares where they could banish their enemies for an eternity, or at least the remains of their mortal life.

Into this abyss, he cast her mind leaving her catatonic, abandoning her in the realm of Melinoe. It would be safe now for the extraction team when they recovered enough to take her away.

Elana used the resulting argument as an opportunity to absorb Banshee’s insubstantiality and Akira’s teleportation abilities and vanish into the void.

There was too much that wouldn’t make sense to the Police of this whole affair, but after the reached the surface, Mary phoned Lieutenant Faye and did her best to explain to him that Michaelakos had been behind a failed assassination attempt on Morgane Le Corre and he’d been killed by her bodyguard. That the explosion at PRX Biogenetics had been staged to eliminate a weaponised virus that Morgane had designed to sell to terrorists and that Morgane was now on the run. They weren’t sure he believed her and they kept the whole vampire conspiracy out of the story but they’d given him enough information to follow up.

They returned home later that day with a now conscious Stacy, apparently unharmed by her ordeal but first they cancelled the apartment lease and informed the rental company where they could find their Peugeot but only after Frankie had lectured both companies about avoiding online fraud such as this in future.

Months later the French news channel reported that PRX Biogenetics was out of business, and the site had been secured by the French authorities. According to (carefully scripted) media reports all virus stocks were destroyed in the explosion.

https://mm3e.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/episode-47-the-fourth-bride/

Intermission

Mace smiled as she powered up her Grav-cycle. There was nothing more she could do without revealing herself to Akira and Banshee and she couldn’t risk that when she was so close to discovering what had happened to her old boss, Joseph DeBois.

She’d first come to Britain after his mysterious ‘death’. Then there had been the secretive funeral with a sealed casket and hastily arranged cremation, not burial in the estate crypt with his ancestors; all carried out within a couple of days of the ‘accident’*

Finally, she had an answer as to why they had handled his death so abruptly. The death had to have been faked, probably using a self-administered poison, only for him to rise as a vampire and be elevated to become a Council member of the Pale Brotherhood.

She’d wanted to do more, to reveal her hand as they would say, but she had been so close to discovering an answer. They hadn’t needed her help really other than to avoid being framed, so she had limited herself to requesting a replacement debit card for Stacy and sending the advice about the apartment by text by hacking into their encrypted comms channel to warn them that they were being set up. It had been enough. It helped that Lieutenant Faye had realised that they were being framed as well. It was time for her to get back to her hunt for the Brotherhood, especially DeBois, and discover more details of their ‘Pale Agenda’.

* https://mm3e.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/episode-21-the-untouchables/

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